A panel of alumni recently visited Bowdoin to speak to students, many of them aspiring healthcare workers, about the importance of diversity in medicine.

The panelists all come from backgrounds traditionally under-represented in healthcare, and they described both the personal challenges they’ve faced in their careers and how their backgrounds have also positively impacted their work.

The New York Times debuted a new video series on its website this week with a segment on comedian Hari Kondabolu ’04, who recently released the comedy album, “Waiting for 2042,” which refers to the year in which the U.S. Census projects caucasians will become the minority in this country.

Conscious of race since growing up in diverse Queens, Kondabolu speaks of turning pain into laughter and confronting racial stereotypes head-on. Watch the clip.

As the keynote speaker for Bowdoin’s 2014 President’s Science Symposium, biologist Sarah Elgin presented a speech rife with lessons learned throughout her illustrious career in the sciences. She set an inspiring example for the dozens of Bowdoin research students in the audience, who later that afternoon presented the fruits of their own summer research labors.

Elgin – who is the Viktor Hamburger Professor of Arts & Sciences in the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis – began making discoveries as an Oregonian high schooler, collecting rainwater after the test explosions of atomic bombs. Read the full story and see a slideshow of the symposium.

Please bear with us while we retroactively post obituaries from back issues of Bowdoin Magazine. This process has currently skewed the chronology of our listings. We're working to fix the problem. In the meantime, please go to bowdoinobituaries.com and search by class year.